Still Lifes

A new technique I'm trying out

Gazing Gifs For A Saturday Night

Girl Code: Constructions of Femininity and Fame

Let me just disclose, first off, that I wanted to do a lot more with this project than I was able to. I made all of my final projects this term way too ambitious, and they all suffered for it. That said, this is a topic that I think about a lot, and hope to continue making art about it in the future.

The goal of this project was to focus on the effects of fame from a New Media point of view, exploring ideas of simulation, falseness, and exaggeration. I wanted to focus on women in the public eye because for many famous women, public attention is pushed away from their work itself and focused on their personal lives and appearances, so they are forced to spend much of their time cultivating their public image.

Many artists and performers have used this phenomenon to enhance their art by making their celebrity a work of art in itself. This is what I chose to focus on for the last suite of images I edited for this project. I took snapshots from music videos in which the artists gaze at the audience with a confrontational, knowing, vulnerable, or otherwise unexpected expression. These are all shots that I felt showed the self-awareness of these artists and the implicit challenge in that self-awareness. I wanted to enhance the sense of artificiality and construction by making the viewer reflect on all the layers of digital media, publicity work, and artistic intent that exist between the viewer and the subject of the image, and making these penetrating gazes that much more impressive.

Janelle Monáe, "Q.U.E.E.N."

Joanna Newsom, "Divers"

Bjork, "Hunter"

Lady Gaga, "Bad Romance"

Beyonce, "Pretty Hurts"

I also made a music video, partially out of a long-standing desire to start an all-female band on campus and partially to feel like I was actually creating something substantial rather than just editing photos. Here is my attempt at an artist's statement for the video, followed by the video itself:

"What is this video supposed to be? Is it simply a sloppy attempt to assemble a girl band? Is it a statement about the infantilizing, patronizing, and minimizing of the work of female artists and performers? Are their heads out of frame to create some semblance of anonymity and universality? Or to remove the focus on the performers' physical appearances? Or to distance them from the audience? Are the performers haughty? Are they naïve? Are they talentless? Are they bored? Why are they using toy instruments? I couldn't say– the final judgement, as always, lies with the audience."

 

Thanks for a great term, and in the words of Jean Baudrillard, 

"You no longer watch TV, TV watches you"

Retail Hell

Progress Report!

 A Suite of Images I Have Been Working On

Asian Art History Job talk Reflection

Let me just say, first off, that Lawrence should’ve had an Asian Art History professor years ago, but I’m thrilled that we’re getting one now! Curse these small department budgets and western priorities!!

Anyway, since I wasn’t able to attend Jennifer Angus’ talk last Friday, I’m writing about the Asian Art History professor job talk given by Christina Spiker on Thursday. I went to this because I love Asian art and I want to be In The Know with this selection process, because it’s such a big step for Lawrence. You should all come to the next candidate’s talk today at 4:30!

The title of Christina Spiker's talk was “Bumbling Tourists in the Indigenous Village: Kondō Kōichiro’s Ainu Illustrations, 1917” and I think she tackled this topic with a lot of enthusiasm and expertise . She clearly knows a lot about the early 20th century Japanese tourism illustrations she’s discussing (which makes sense if she’s writing a dissertation about it) and she also was very aware of how these very specific prints depicting the Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan, fit into a global history of imperialism and ethnic tourism implemented not only by Westerners, as people often think. I learned a lot from her talks about the Ainu people and how they are represented– and misrepresented– by these strange tourists. In addition, it was interesting to learn about early japanese newspaper printing and illustration, and this artist who both wrote and illustrated his adventures– a bit of a push and he could’ve become an early comics artist!

All in all, I think Spiker came at this subject with a lot of perspective and subtlety, and I was very impressed with her talk. It’s clear that she knows and cares a great deal about Asian art, and is equally concerned with it’s global context and relevance to today’s world, which is exactly what I, at least, want for this position. If I have time next year, I would love to take classes from her.

Final Project Action Plan

I don't actually have anything as decisive as that title yet for my project. I want the process of this to be almost stream of consciousness as I reflect on topics of celebrity, femininity, limitation, and control. I am going to create digital images– still images, animated gifs, and perhaps video as well– about celebrities and public perception of famous women. This is something I think about a lot (I even wrote a paper last term about how Marie Antoinette never existed as a real person because we know nothing of her real life or personality based on her public personas!).

I want to bring the women I study into the lens of metacognition and get people to think about how all we know about these people's lives is a media construction. Having a well-groomed public image is an essential part of commercial success for female celebrities. They must be collaborative multimedia artists. I want to bring their art out of the woodwork and make them look as flattened and constructed as they must be for a public that still can't comprehend women as complex beings.

Here is the series of mononym "icons" I showed today in class, taken from 128x128 pixel icons. They would probably look best Really Big:

Bjork

Beyonce

Cher

Oprah

Madonna

Rihanna